When you know how to use pay-per-click and position it in the right way, you’ll find that you can actually generate leads through a finance offer—and I’m going to show you how. The goal of this campaign is to deliver extreme perceived value in your local market. If there’s an absence of value in your local marketplace, you’ll always be competing on price alone.

That’s why this campaign is structured to help you avoid attracting those homeowners who are looking for three to five quotes and really wasting your time in the sales process. If you implement this campaign, you can increase your closing percentages and get really qualified leads. We’ll make it as easy as possible for the homeowner to take action by giving them all the details they need up front to self-qualify. If you’re willing to give roughly a 10 to 12% discount off the normal cost of a premium installation, then this campaign is for you. It’s designed for helping you position your premium product.

Financing

Let’s do the math. If your average install is about $5,000, you’re going to offer $500 to $600 back as a discount. We’re going to be positioning a finance offer with this discount, so instead of positioning some kind of money back offer, we’re going to give it back in terms of financing. Let me show you what I mean.

First, before we put together any financing offer, you want to get your fine print out of the way. I started by going to Bankrate.com, and you can replicate this exercise for your own campaign. Because I’m positioning a premium product, I’m looking at a $5,000 install. My loan term is 10 years and my interest rate is right around 6%. That will be in the fine print on my landing page. That makes for monthly payments of $55.51, but I’ll round it up to $57 because I think that sounds better.

The Three-legged Stool

Now before you go and get involved with any kind of online advertising campaign, I want to remind you of my three-legged stool analogy. This refers to the three components of a healthy, top-performing pay-per-click campaign. When one of the legs of the stool is broken, you’re going to have poor performance. The first leg is your keywords. You have to make sure you have the right keywords to attract the right audience, and a lot goes into that. You need the keywords that you want to bid on, plus bad keywords to place as negative keywords and offset poor lead quality. That’s the first leg of the stool.

The second leg of the stool is going to be the ad copy. You have to make sure that you have a fully baked out ad using all of Google’s features.

The third leg of the stool is going to be your landing page. You have to make sure that you have a landing page that matches your ad copy and the keyword that was searched. When you have all of these three pieces put together, then you’re going to have a highly successful online advertising campaign.

The last thing you want to do is slap together a promotion, put it out there, and throw a budget at it. If you do, you’ll bleed out and get a bad result. On the other hand, when you put these three things together, you’ll have a decent level of performance.

Furnace Campaigns

For example, in our furnace replacement or furnace sales campaigns, we actively bid on roughly 345 keywords, and that’s just in the sales category. We have an additional 2,000+ negative keywords that we will put in place as well. This is broken into different categories: furnace replacement, furnace sales, heating contractor, and so on. These are all the terms that we have seen drive in furnace replacement sales.

There’s a lot of history that goes into building our campaigns. Each year, we go back into all of our HVAC clients. We extract all the data that drove in leads and resulted in sales to continue making these campaigns even better. We’re on our fifth iteration of our furnace sales campaign, and it is a very highly effective campaign. If it performs anything like our A/C season, this offer is going to pull in a lot of good results.

Expanded Text Ads

If you want my keyword list, you’re going to have to become a client, but I’m going to share with you what the ad copy looks like in this blog. First, you need to understand expanded text ads because we’re using all of Google’s features here. You can double the size of your ads by using all of the available features, and it doesn’t cost you any more to implement them. You just have to use them in the right order.

In my ad copy, I’m positioning furnace replacement at $57 a month, with zero down plus nine payments on us. Do you see what I did there? Those nine payments hold the discount, rather than saying, “$57 a month, with zero down plus $500 off.” I’m going to use the $500 tax credit as my additional cash bonus in this kind of offer. Perhaps you’ve seen this used by national offices in the auto industry when they’re trying to pull in new models and get rid of their inventory. Now, you need to do a bit of research because you can’t run this in every single state. Some states don’t allow you to have this kind of finance offer.

That being said, this is a positioning statement. It really works on the back end. When do you give the discount? How do you give the discount? Do you really make the nine payments, or do you just write it off in the sales process? You could write it off as a discount, make the nine payments, or give the homeowner the option. How you structure the back end of this kind of offer is completely up to you. What I’m doing is taking that 10% off and positioning it as nine payments on us.

I also include, “Limited time offer. Call today, get approved, and book a free in-person estimate.” That’s my next step—to get approved and book a free in-person estimate—and I’m going to qualify the homeowner when they call. That’s the core of the ad. You’re going to notice all the other features as well. I use the call feature here. I mention we’re local since 1970. I promise one-day installation from NATE certified technicians. I’m using call-out extensions and differentiating factors. I’m working in a snippet for services, the benefit, reviews, site links, and a warranty.

Strategy

There’s a strategy to all of this, and I’ve made it all available to you. If you’re interested, go to www.AdCopyFormula.com, and you can download my guide to building and constructing an ad. There’s a lot that takes place, and I actually show you how to build a sales letter pretty quickly. Once you do all the groundwork, you can have a nice compelling ad that will work for you for years to come.

Now, in terms of positioning, you don’t have to run this ad in the first position. In fact, I never run a sales ad in the first position. I always get a better result in the third or fourth position. That means you can get a better volume of leads at about a 66% discount. We always pay about two-thirds less when we ride this ad below others.

This has everything to do with taking advantage of how little time, effort, and energy your competitors are putting into their ads. If they’re not taking this kind of approach to their Google AdWords, and they just kind of slap up an ad that doesn’t make sense to the buyer intent, then you can walk away and pull in a lot of leads with a smarter ad at a lower position. By the time they catch up to you, the season is already over.

After you test the finance offer, you can easily tweak the ad to run a loss leader campaign. You may offer furnace replacement starting at $29 a month, with zero down plus 12 payments on us. Once your structure is in place, you can easily split test this premium positioning with a loss leader.

Now, there are certain times of the year when this campaign works best. This is usually a late stage ad I like to run, between right after Thanksgiving and sometime in March. I usually like to work in my repair versus replacement ad earlier in the season, and then I turn this one on.

Landing Page

Now that you’ve seen the ad, let’s talk about the landing page. Ours is mobile responsive because we’ve seen that about 60% of traffic for repair calls comes through a mobile device. Last year, that number was fifty percent, and back in 2012, when we started to first measure mobile activity, it was just 12 percent. It’s more important than ever that your landing page be mobile responsive.

For replacement traffic, you’re going to find a lot of cross-device searches. People may start their search on mobile and then move to their desktop. On this landing page, we track all of that performance. We can look at the IP addresses and track somebody’s click history using the cookies that we plant here.

At the same time, you always want to keep in mind that the one click close doesn’t always apply to a sales process. That’s why it’s always a good idea to reinforce this ad with remarketing. Here’s how it works: A prospect may be interested, click on your ad, and then fall off without taking action. They haven’t really presented themselves, filled out a form, or called you, so they haven’t converted to become a lead. You can now put a remarketing campaign in front of them, and your ad will follow them on ESPN, Fox News, CNN, or wherever they go online. You’ll even be able to see your ad following your prospects. Remarketing is always a good idea because it reinforces and protects your click traffic.

On my landing page, I have the same offer that I presented in my ad: “Zero down and $57 a month when you replace your furnace with Same Day Comfort. Plus, we’ll even make your first nine payments for you. Plus, get up to $500 in federal tax credits. Call and get approved today.” That last bit is my call to action, where I really push the phone number and have form submissions. You’re going to get more form submissions on a replacement or sales-related landing page than you would repairs.

I have my sales copy right there on the landing page. It reads, “If you want to save money on expensive heating repairs, eliminate wasteful spending when it comes to operating your old furnace, and stay warm when the chilly weather arrives, get your furnace replaced with Same Day Comfort.” It goes through the whole gamut of sales copy, which I show you how to construct in my Ad Copy Formula training.

Improve Landing Page Performance

Now, in terms of technology and what goes into it, I’ll explain what we’re using and how we’re tracking everything. There’s seven things that we look at on a landing page to improve performance:

Time and date – Really, the weather is going to be a factor in this kind of campaign as well, but the time and date tells you what kind of search traffic patterns happen.

The duration – In other words, how long does somebody stay on the page before they take action or fall off?

The keyword that got them to the landing page

The device that they searched on

The type of browser that they were on

The IP address

The interaction – We can record this using our technology.

When we track all of this, we can put together a smart strategy and really optimize performance. For example, if we find that a lot of people who search on desktop don’t convert as a lead, but we’re spending more money on desktop than mobile, then we’ll apply more budget to mobile and get a better result. The same goes for keyword performance. If you have a keyword that doesn’t work, we optimize it or we cut it from the strategy.

All of our clients get a real-time dashboard so they can track the effectiveness of the campaigns. They can see what their cost per lead is, how well the landing pages are converting, and how the clicks are converting on the ad copy. We put together a full package on metrics, because the metrics are important—they tell a story.

We’re able to really see which devices are performing and driving in the most action, as well as when and how the phone calls are coming in. We even record all the calls and listen to those for our clients to make sure they’re getting good lead quality.

Experience

Each month, we at AdMachines generate about 25,000 leads for our home services clients. I’ve been a Google AdWords expert since 2002. I have way over a million leads under my belt, and my team here has a lot of experience driving in HVAC leads. AdMachines is a Google premier partner, a status we’ve earned through Google that is only awarded to 3% of ad agencies.

If you’re interested in working with AdMachines, we have packages starting at $297 a month. Our first step is to set up a one-on-one demo. Go to AdMachines.com/demo to request your personalized demonstration.

If you’re looking for a resource to help you understand or better optimize your pay-per-click performance, I have a book out there called The Google AdWords Survival Guide. If you’re a business owner, you can request a free copy. Just shoot me an email at Steve@Admachines.com. I’m also the creator of The Ad Copy Formula.

If you’re interested in learning more about other campaigns that we have available in the heating and cooling space, go to SellHVAC.com. Register there, and you’ll receive an email every time I put out a new campaign like this,